Seating arrangements at stadiums and other large facilities around the world are primarily designed to accommodate able-bodied persons by using basic fold-down seating configurations. Individuals in wheelchairs are generally limited to sitting in areas allocated for wheelchair use at predetermined locations throughout the stadium. The advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which mandates the scope of the accommodations that must be provided for individuals in wheelchairs, has prompted stadium owners to expand the seating areas for these individuals.
The seating arrangements prevalent in today's newly erected stadiums accommodate wheelchairs by providing individual seats mounted on a single post that fold up and swing away to provide an area between the posts sufficiently large for a wheelchair. This distance, which must be at least thirty-three inches as required by the ADA, dictates the number of seats available in a given row. This configuration requires a minimum separation distance between each post in a given row of seats. Conventional wheelchair accessible stadium seating merely provides sixty-six inches of open space between two folded seats to accommodate two individuals in wheelchairs. Accordingly, these seating configurations must necessarily allow for empty space between the adjacent posts upon which the individual seats are mounted, creating an inefficient waste of space between adjacent posts. As such, the conventional stadium seating fails to maximize the seating space achieved by the current invention.
Moreover, these individual seats are mounted on single posts and are stowed by pivoting the seating area upward and rotating the entire seat about a fixed pivot point. However, because the seat if fixed at the pivot point, the rotated seat encroaches upon the aisle behind where the individuals in wheelchairs are seated.
Conventional handicapped seating has another inherent drawback in that when folded and pivoted away, the seat effectively creates a "wall" or barrier between either the individual in the wheelchair and an individual in a standard seat, or between two individuals, both in wheelchairs.